Week 6: Barbara Kruger

1.Research Kruger's work to find an example from the 1970s or 1980s to compare with a more recent work. How has Kruger's work changed with the developments in contemporary visual arts? Describe a recent work that moves away from the 'poster' type work of her early career.

- Krugers work firstly began as mostly focusing on black and white works. Her earlier work consisted of her own photography which gave it her own personal style. Over time she still kept her style

of her work and started including more colour. She was very interested in the graphic design style ever since she was young. Her work is very suitable for posters as the style is very out there and shows a point. H

er style of work is basically the roots for this style of work and works from other artists today also resemble the same pop art style.

2. How does the audience experience a more spatial, installation art work compared with a poster?

- Krugers work 'Twelve' consists of large projector screen consisting of people talking across the room with text going along the bottom of the screen. The size of the work makes the audience feel very powerless as these large projections tower over them talking across the room. This work is much different to her normal style of still posters because this work consists of moving images and sound. The shear size of the work is good because it is displayed all around the audience to they pay more attention to it then a small poster stuck on the wall.

3. What elements does Kruger use in her work to create a strong impact?

- Kruger uses many different elements in her work to get her point across. I think it is the way she uses bold text usually white place over a dark image so the contrast of the two colours makes the text more strong and vivid. Kruger's use of colour is also used very limitlessly. Her use of colour in her work is usually used as text so this makes it automatically stand out from the rest of the work. I think this is good because the point she is trying to show to her audience is usually written in the actual text not the images.

4. Comment on the development of her work over the last 30 years.

- Krugers work has changed over the last 30 years. She has began to pull away from her traditional work of pop art and posters and began to take advantage of technology and incorporated video and audio into her work. Personally I think her style has changed dramatically as she was very well known for her still poster work and now that she is changing her style it is becoming much different than previous works. This idea of change can also work well because it opens it up for her to try different things using different media other than posters.

References:

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2010/05/04/f-barbara-kruger-contact-photography-festival.html